Introduction

Does it make a difference as to a fantasy baseball team’s starting draft position? Are all draft slots created equally? Is it better to be at the ends (wheel/turn), or rather, is it more opportune to make one’s selections from the middle of the order?

To try and help us answer these questions, let’s look at what happened in 2019. Now, of course, the current season isn’t over just yet – there are still a few more weeks of baseball. However, now in mid-September, it is sufficiently late in the season for us to analyze how the draft positions played out over the course of 2019.

Sources Used

For this study, we will observe the standings for three different league types:

• TGFBI – 21 Leagues
• NFBC Main Event – 38 Leagues
• NFBC Draft Champions – 230 Leagues

TGBFI (The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational) is our own Justin Mason’s creation. It is a compilation of 315 fantasy baseball experts, divided into 21 NFBC-Style divisions. The 315 experts are also pitted against each other in a large overall competition. [I am the host of the TGFBI Beat the Shift Podcast, which can be found right here.]

The NFBC (National Fantasy Baseball Championship) Main Event is a set of high money entry leagues, with large financial payouts for the victors. As with TGFBI, the teams are all additionally entered into an overall contest with even larger payouts for the top finishers.

The NFBC Draft Champion leagues are money league contests as well (although their cost and payouts are far less than that of the main event leagues). As I will further describe below, they are 50-round slow drafts.

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We’ve spent a lot of virtual column inches, podcast minutes, and tweets discussing the new reality of offense in baseball. Call it the rabbit ball, super happy fun ball, or bouncy ball, whatever you want, but we know that the current structure of the league’s baseballs has fueled an explosion. It’s not the ball alone, players are more in tune with their swings and more of them are understanding the importance of putting the ball in the air to maximize power output.

A quick scan of your own team likely gives you an idea of how different this environment is as many player lines look complete already and we still have a month left. But where exactly are we in relation to previous seasons? Let’s take a look:

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8/22/19

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to Fangraphs! With a standard $20 membership, you help maintain and improve our database of stats and graphs as well as our staff of 8 full-time employees and over 50 contributors. The premium ad-free membership at $50 year supports site growth and also includes faster load speeds and better site performance. You can also support monthly for just $3.

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• @sporer – Host
• @justinmasonfwfb – Co-Host/Producer
• @RotoGut – Guest Vlad Sedler

2020 Draft – 3 Rounds

Vlad, Justin, and Paul each take control of five “teams” and draft the first three rounds for them and discuss the thought process behind the 45 picks.

Draft Board

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Introduction

On the latest episode of The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational Podcast, I posed the following question:

In 2020 fantasy baseball drafts for roto leagues, which will you do early on?

A) Draft Speed Early
B) Pound the Power

Simultaneously, I posed the identical question on Twitter, yielding the following results:

The Twitter responses, as well as the members of the TGFBI Beat the Shift Podcast panel were pretty evenly split on what was more important to focus on. Obviously, fantasy owners need to focus on both; players who can amass a broad base of stats are ideal. But the question is still a valid one – in a vacuum, all things being equal, which player type should you favor in a draft?

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This is an updated version of an article originally posted in 2013 and then reposted in 2015, 2017, and 2018. It’s a vitally important exercise to perform, so I think it’s worthwhile to continue to resurface it each season around this time.

Heading into the final two months of the season, the effect any individual player will have on our place in the standings has continued to diminish, which means that this time of year represents one of the final chances to dramatically improve our teams. It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but it’s important to reiterate for those still clinging to preseason values (I usually cling to them far longer than most, but even I know to give them up at this point!) — right now, you need to essentially throw player values out the window and trade for needs based on your position in the various statistical categories. Don’t worry about overpaying if you still expect the trade to net you positive points. Obviously, you want to make a trade that brings back the greatest value in return and gain you the most standings points. However, if the best return offered to you is a player our auction calculator projects to earn $7 the rest of the way for your projected $13 player, it’s still absolutely worth accepting if you determine that accepting the trade would gain you total points.

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There are four more homestands in Coors Field this year. Players heading to Coors are always sought after, but the park is somehow playing even crazier than normal making those guys even more appealing. This past weekend saw several San Francisco Giants garner some attention with a four-game set in Coors including Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford (who paid off handsomely with 3 HR in the doubleheader on Monday), Kevin Pillar, Alex Dickerson, and Mike Yastrzemski.

Let’s look ahead at the next two Coors homestands and see if we can plan for potential pickups and avoid paying full price the weekend for those series.

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Mark Feinsand did a piece at MLB.com highlighting a player per position who could be dealt later this month, a good look at the early market that I recommend you read. What I’d like to do is look into the aftermath of those potential trades and highlight some guys who could fall into jobs. If you’re light on FAAB like I am in some leagues, you may consider acting early – especially with those who are almost certainly on the move – and scoop some of these guys in the coming weeks instead of waiting until August 1st.

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Did you know home runs are up on the year? No one’s talking about it! It’s crazy.

…

OK, so everyone’s talking about it always and I’m going to do the same today. While seemingly everyone is hitting homers left and right, some guys have been left in the cold and they’ve taken up residence on all of my teams. Hilarious, Paul… absolutely hilarious. Anyway, there are some guys with batted ball profiles worthy of more home runs than they are currently hitting, creating some buying opportunities for those of you lagging a bit in power.

Here are four guys to consider going after:

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Looking at team batting performance by handedness to identify some potential pitching pickups to exploit the matchups. This is using a probable starter schedule from June 24th – July 7th. It is subject to change (obviously!) so stay tuned, especially with the later ones.

Worst offenses against righties all season through June 19th by wRC+:

• Tigers – 74 wRC+
• Marlins – 75
• Giants – 77
• Blue Jays – 78
• Orioles – 81

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Today’s data dump is brought to you by Paul Sporer and Justin Mason. In a recent Sleeper and the Bust episode, they were frustrated with not knowing how bidding in a 12-team league compared to a 15-teamer. I decided to go ahead and dive into the bidding in the NFBC’s 12-team Online Championship and the 15-team Main Event.

Note: I worked on this article over the weekend and only had this season’s FAAB data up to week 10. By the time the article publishes, week 11 will be available. The results wouldn’t change much with one additional week.

First, here is some background information on the league types. They are exactly identical in these ways:

• 23 total starters, 9 pitchers, 14 hitters
• $1000 in FAAB to spend with no Vickrey bidding and the results run on Sunday evening.
• No $0 bids.
• Seven bench spots.
• Both have a league and overall prize.

As for the differences, one is obvious, one has 12 teams and the other 15 teams. The less obvious one is that the 12-team leagues, on average, start drafting earlier in the preseason. For this reason, MLB teams have more time to churn their rosters and deal with injuries making the first FAAB period a little more aggressive compared to the 15-team leagues.

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